Pat Garvey

One of Ireland's first research millionaires, Garvey started out in business working for photocopying giant Rank Xerox, which was where he met the late Eddie Kerr.

In 1980, Garvey and Kerr partnered up to found Sharptext, a photocopier and office products company that acted as Sharp's agency for Ireland. It was good timing and the business grew rapidly.

Sharptext bought British office equipment distributor Micro-P in 1989, and with this it became one of the major office equipment distributors in both Ireland and Britain. As the information innovation age slowly began, Sharptext would become Ireland's leading distributor of computer products.

Garvey and Kerr and a third partner broadened their interests and as well set up GFK innovation, a payroll software company, in 1985. It was bought out by Sage in 2003.

Number of other innovation companies

He went on to invest in a number of other innovation companies, including Deecal, Kadius, eWare and Cara Group. He was a director at Anne Heraty's CPL Resources from when it first floated on the Iseq in 1999 only leaving the board in 2007.

He owns a venture capital and private equity firm called Riantec. He recently became a director at ElectricHosts, a British cloud computing company.